Multiple threads missing in certain communities

historical posts missing

piefed.ca was only set up and started federating within the past couple months. When a lemmy community is initially federated to a piefed instance, lemmy will provide some of the most recent posts in that community to help backfill, but it won’t backfill everything.

upvote/downvote totals don’t match

Similar to the above issue, when posts/comments are backfilled, the votes are not. So, when a historical post is federated over, it comes over with just a single upvote (implied from the OP). Only votes that show up after that post has federated over will register.

In general though, votes are going to vary from instance to instance, even across different lemmy instances, but moreso across piefed instances. This is due to a combination of factors. Sometimes federation is just a bit flaky due to network issues, sometimes there are instance-level blocks (defederations) that prevent some votes from federating to all instances, sometimes users might be banned from certain instances and their vote won’t count.

For piefed specifically, users have the option to only vote locally and not federate their vote out to other instances. This option can be found near the bottom of your settings page, just above the feeds settings. Federating your votes means that they work just like lemmy and other instances can see your vote and it influences stuff like ranking for different sorting algorithms on those instances. However, it does mean that your vote is visible publicly to activitypub software (like lemvotes). Keeping your vote local only means that it is more private, but it will only impact ranking on your local instance.